Convenings, Resources, Meet the Artist and Deaths

Compiled by Janet McMahon

Convenings

A Commission of Inquiry to Investigate U.S.-Backed Israeli War Crimes in Palestine will be holding mass public inquiries throughout the U.S. at which evidence of U.S. collusion in Israeli war crimes will be gathered. Evidence will include video footage, experts and eyewitnesses, written reports and, in some cities, live video and audio feed from the occupied territories. The opening hearings will be held Oct. 5 in New York City, with subsequent hearings in San Francisco and Los Angeles, then in cities around the U.S. and internationally. For more information, or to volunteer or organize a local hearing, e-mail <dc@internationalanswer.org> or call (212) 633-6646 (New York), (415) 821-6545 (S.F.) or (213) 487-2368 (L.A.).

Resources

Information on national and international movements to boycott Israeli products is available at two Web sites: <http://boycottisraeligoods.org> (U.S.) and <http:www.inminds.co.uk/boycott-israel.html> (UK).

The Committee to Protect Journalists has translated into Arabic the overview of the Middle East and North Africa and country summaries from its March 2002 annual report, Attacks on the Press. The Arabic-language version is available at <http://www.cpj.org/regions_02/mideast_02/arabic_AOP_02/Contents2_AR.html>

MEET THE ARTIST

As part of his summer artist-in-residency at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor Art Museum, and in conjunction with the “Eternal Egypt” exhibition currently on view, artist Khalil Bendib (whose cartoons appear each issue in “The World Looks at the Middle East”) will be sculpting and answering questions in the museum’s Rodin Gallery from 6 to 8:45 p.m. Aug. 27, Sept. 24, Oct. 15 and Nov. 15. The Museum is located in San Francisco’s Lincoln Park; for additional information call (415) 750-3600.

DEATHS

Suliman Saleh Olayan, founding chairman and long-time chief executive of The Olayan Group, died July 4 in New York, where he had been undergoing medical treatment, at the age of 83. Born in 1918 and orphaned at a young age, he founded a single trucking company in 1947 in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province that evolved into the present-day diversified enterprise and major participant in the field of global investing. Geographically, the company expanded throughout the Middle East and, eventually to the U.S. and Europe. In addition to his business acumen, Mr. Olayan was known for his community and national efforts and interest in international relations. Among the honors he received were Knight Commander of the British Empire, Sweden’s Royal Order of the Polar Star, and Spain’s Order of Merit. He is survived by his wife, Mary Olayan, his son, Khaled, who has been named to succeed his father as group chairman, daughters Hayat, Hutham and Lubna, and 12 grandchildren.

John Wallach, award-winning journalist and founder of Seeds of Peace, died July 10 of lung cancer at his home in New York at the age of 59. The son of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, he graduated from Middlebury College in Vermont. During his 27-year career at Hearst Newspapers he worked first as a reporter and then as foreign editor. Among the stories he broke were the Iran-Contra scandal, for which he received the National Press Club’s highest honor, the Edwin Hood Award. For his coverage of the 1978 Camp David accords he received the Congressional Correspondents Award. Following the 1993 World Trade Center attack he decided to abandon journalism and found Seeds of Peace, which began with 45 Palestinian, Egyptian and Israeli young people attending a summer camp in Otisfield, Maine. There he hoped to “create a safe and emotionally secure environment for youngsters to relate to one another and, in the process, to hopefully lay the basis…for genuine peace.” Since then, the organization has brought together over 2,000 teenagers from the Middle East, the Balkans, Cyprus, India, Pakistan and, for the first time this year, Afghanistan. For his work with Seeds of Peace, Wallach was awarded the UNESCO Peace Prizes in 1998 and 2000 and the Hashemite Kingdom Legion of Honor, presented to him by Jordan’s late King Hussein. Wallach co-authored three books with his wife, Janet: Still Small Voices, a 1989 book about Palestinian and Israeli peace advocates; Arafat: In the Eye of the Beholder and The New Palestinians. He is survived by his wife and two sons.

Retired Maj. Gen. Benny Peled, who commanded the Israeli air force during the 1973 war and the 1976 rescue of Israeli hostages in Entebbe, Uganda, died in Jerusalem July 13 of emphysema at the age of 74. Born in Tel Aviv in 1928, he began his military service as an airplane mechanic, later becoming one of the Israeli air force’s first jet pilots. Wounded when his French Mystere fighter jet was shot down near Sharm al-Sheikh in the Sinai invasion of 1956, he hid until he was rescued by a fellow pilot as Egyptian soldiers were closing in. He studied aeronautics in the early 1960s, and was one of the architects of the surprise attack that inaugurated the 1967 war, decimating the Egyptian air force on the ground. Five months after he became air force commander in 1973, Egypt and Syria returned the favor in a surprise attack on the Israeli-occupied Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights. The Israeli air force lost more than 100 planes. “The problem,” Peled told The Jerusalem Report in a 1998 interview, “was not where was the air force, but where was the intelligence the air force should have received.” After the war he instituted a separate air force intelligence independent of the Israeli ground forces and intelligence corps.

Krishan Kant, vice president of India since 1997, died July 27 in New Delhi of a heart attack at the age of 75. A native of Punjab, as a teenager he joined the Quit India movement advocating independence from Britain. An advocate of land reform, he had entered India’s upper house of parliament as a member of the ruling Congress party’s left wing, but was expelled from the party in the mid-1970s, when he opposed Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s declaration of a “state of emergency” and suspension of civil liberties. In 1977 he was elected to parliament as a member of the Janata Party, and served as governor of the state of Andhra Pradesh from 1989 to 1997. He had been scheduled to leave the office of vice president in August.

Abdullah Malikyar, Afghan ambassador to the U.S. from 1967 to 1977, died Aug. 4 at a Washington, DC hospital of a heart ailment at the age of 93. A resident of Wheaton, MD, he was born in Ghazni, Afghanistan, attended college in his native country, and later was governor of Herat province. He also served as Afghanistan’s minister of communications and of finance, as first deputy prime minister, and ambassador to London and Tehran. He settled in the United States in 1979, and in recent years helped publicize the conditions of the Afghan people under communist and Taliban rule.